Benchmark Capital is a venture capital firm responsible for the early stage funding of some very successful startups. Benchmark made its mark as the sole early investor in eBay. In 1997, the firm invested $6.7 million in eBay, which became worth more than $5 billion by the spring of 1999 and resulted in one of Silicon Valley's best-performing investments ever . Other high profile investments yielding big returns for the firm include Ariba, Juniper Networks, and Red Hat. Such investments helped establish Benchmark as a top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm, despite its relatively young age.

Benchmark Capital is unusual in that its partners are compensated equally, rather than using the standard venture capital "star" model. The firm was made popular by their successes in venture capital as well as the book eBoys by Randall Stross.

Investments

Benchmark has invested in more than 150 startups since its inception in 1995, including Infinera, MySQL, OpenTable, Second Life, Tellme Networks, Yelp, Inc., and Zillow, as well as franchise companies like eBay, Juniper Networks, and Red Hat. The firm manages nearly $3 billion in committed capital and has been widely recognized for its commitment to open source. Other notable investments include AOL, 1-800-Flowers, eBags,Friendster, JAMDAT, MetaCafe, Palm Computing, Seeking Alpha, and Zipcar.

Team

The firm is made up of the following members:

General Partners

• Bruce Dunlevie -- investments include: Accept.com (acquired by Amazon.com), Good Technology (acquired by Motorola), Handspring (acquired by Palm), and Pure Digital Technologies
• Bill Gurley -- investments include: Second Life, OpenTable, Vudu, Nanosolar, and Zillow
• Kevin Harvey -- investments include: Tellme Networks (sold to Microsoft), Zimbra (sold to Yahoo!), Ingenio (sold to AT&T), MySQL (sold to Sun for $1 billion)
• Bob Kagle-- investments include eBay (EBAY), mint.com, prosper.com, Gaia Online, Jamba Juice, and Zipcar
• Peter Fenton -- investments include: FriendFeed, EngineYard, New Relic, Pentaho, Polyvore, Coremetrics, XenSource, SpringSource, Yelp, Inc., Zuora, and Zimbra
• Alex Balkanski -- investments include: Infinera (INFN), Entrisphere (sold to Ericsson), Ambarella, and Mu Security
• Steve Spurlock -- operating partner who runs day-to-day operations and acts as counsel to the firm
• Mitch Lasky -- investments include: Numobiq, Vivox, and a new Ruby on Rails company -- Engine Yard
• Matt Cohler -- former vice president of product management at Facebook and former vice president & general manager at LinkedIn; joined Benchmark in Fall, 2008.

Partners

• David Beirne
• Andy Rachleff

Venture Partner